Will Backbone stand the test of time as both data binding and DOM eventing continue to evolve? I'm not resolutely convinced of Backbone's staying power, but I'm open to entertaining other thoughts on the matter.
1,881 karma · joined May 24, 2010
I'm not saying that I can't get deep into technical specs or literature, but when it comes to a form that is largely prose... forget about it. Breadth-first search takes over.
It seems that a few bad drone pilots are causing problems for all of the good actors in the system. Since there is so much potential for injury, and since it only takes one terrible incident to bring down stiff regulation on everyone, perhaps drone piloting should become a licensed activity or sport.
Establishing drone pilot licensing would theoretically ensure that legal, licensed pilots are aware of the risks and are willing to assume greater personal liability in the event of operator negligence. The hobby would gain legitimate legal grounding and become less "cowboy" more or less overnight. I can't imagine it would be remain crowded with careless risk takers.
If this is done early, before any major incident or bad press, the FAA won't have to step in and put more rules and regulations in place. If there are to be new rules, I imagine that they wouldn't be nearly as overbearing for a well-behaved professional hobby that doesn't needlessly put health and lives at risk.
I think professional hobbyist (not an oxymoron?) drone pilots should lobby lawmakers for something like this to take place as soon as possible, before the FAA starts making mandates. I can certainly see the FAA's concerns--there is legitimate risk and danger. Something will eventually happen that brings the entire house of cards down. If the drone pilots don't ask for this self-regulation themselves, I wouldn't necessarily be against the FAA moving ahead on its own.
On a personally related note, I'm involved in hobbyist high-wattage laser projection for making video games and interactive displays. (I think there are videos linked from my HN profile). The entire lasing community cringes when there is news of some idiot shining a laser pointer at a plane or when someone is caught using a high-wattage laser for destructive purposes. It's a seemingly regular occurrence, and I'm pretty certain there will be regulation coming down the pipeline eventually. It seems there is no shortage of careless ignorance when it comes to dangerous hobbies.
Don't take this as being too lazy to Google; I was hoping to hear some anecdotes about acclimation or something.
Does HN now have image emoticons, or is my phone's browser swapping out the last bit of text here? If it's the latter, this is unwanted behavior.
Because I find the lens of another's opinion or experience a useful tool in normalizing perception, I'm going to state my personal reaction to your posts. I sincerely do not mean to insult or offend you. If you feel differently, I understand. To me, a tone like yours paints a picture of a defensive, self-righteous bully. You state that you will not be censored, yet your language is coercive and might implicitly have that exact effect upon others. Would you really want to hurt someone else's ambition? There are enough problems in the world already without adding to the weight of their burden.
Again, just my personal take on your comments.
On a related note, try to better frame your arguments for the benefit of everyone else here. If you disagree with something, qualify your assertions so that they might be useful instead of adding more noise and entropy. For instance, you could have written a compelling and thoughtful argument about why you consider the DOM to be the wrong solution. Making an effort to write in this manner adds significant weight to your argument and brings value to those that are reading.
Take this as my personal challenge to you: consider the things you write and how others might react to them. We're all under the influence of neuropeptide signaling as we interact with others, and we can only make our best attempt at civility (which is unfortunately not a first-class a biological concept). I understand, and I assure you that I don't want to censor you or otherwise neuter your human experience. I have stated all of this expressly for your use. I have nothing to gain by taking the time to respond here.
Be chill. Relax. Abide. The universe is slipping all of us by far too quickly to waste time with being aggressive. Certain things just don't matter in light of that.
In the end, optimization forces operating at levels beyond our comprehension and ability to fully model will determine whether or not this project sees continued development. Personal lives, adcademic interest, social proliferation of memes, economic constraints...all serve as inputs. Don't force an outcome like this. You might damage the author's impetus to try again with more ambition in the future. Let nature run its course; you may occasionally find yourself surprised by the outcome.
In general, it is pointless to rationalize your choices to the rest of the world, which frankly doesn't put as much effort into listening as you might think.
Sorry if I come across as rude. I just think this could be better framed as constructive criticism.
Search and traversal become increasingly difficult as any graph grows in size. It's not hard to generalize this to the graph of scientific and engineering knowledge. To maintain the connectedness of our ideas, we must either leave amazing literature and documentation or we must constantly seek to foster connections between those of separate, heterogenous fields and disciplines. Unless there is movement of ideas through collective human consciousness, key insights cannot percolate through to the point where they have the greatest impact. (For instance, not long ago biologists were still using Perl. :P) At some point, the time it takes for certain information to spread across the graph grows substantial enough that discoveries are simply repeated over.
Science and technology require ever-increasing levels of specialization. The network topology isn't going to get easier for the human mind to traverse. Imagine what kind of information lies just beyond your reach--the kind of insights that might truly propel you ahead, to reach your Eureka. If only you knew what you were missing out on. On the flip side, do you ever think about the places where your contributions would be the most impactful?
These problems are somewhat symptomatic of the fact that we haven't breached the complexity threshold of what our brains are capable of performing. We may have computer-aided tools to get us beyond some classes of problem--search and mathematical modeling come to mind. Still, our mastering of breadth at depth, our powers of abstraction and of reasoning, all have a hard limit. Everything we've ever done falls neatly within defined lines. Nothing being done today is substantially harder than what the previous generation did with its much more limited set of knowledge. (Have we discovered our generation's calculus or quantum mechanics? Advancements like that are special, truly rare, set apart by hundreds of years.)
Take your smartphone, for instance. You can't look at the following block diagrams and tell me they're too difficult to reason about:
* http://eda360insider.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung-exy...
* http://www.arm.com/images/Cortex-A15-chip-diagram-LG.png
* http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/blogs/insights/wp-co...
(Yes, I know the implementation details go much deeper and that these diagrams are meant for ease of conveying knowledge. You still understand them. And given time, a diligent student can learn to contribute to processor design using the pre-existing domain knowledge.)
Do you have a sense or appreciation for how complex the physical and chemical reality is by contrast? We can only partially understand minute samples taken from real systems. It's not especially owing to our primitive equipment or tooling; it's the sheer complexity that baffles us. There are things like helium atoms--we don't understand them. There's Hartree-Fock, but that's an approximation.
I find it hard to be beholden to the majesty of a phone when no one can stand up and explain a helium atom. I mean, don't you find it a little bit amusing we're still caking onto SGML, shoveling it onto handsets, and yet we don't understand the interstitial gas between us and the cell tower? The stuff we're breathing.
Anecdotes from the early days of AI research suggest that we didn't think we'd still be writing code imperatively, yet here we are writing Javascript module frameworks and the like. We have a stunningly powerful ability to underestimate how long and difficult things are. We are also often satisfied in rediscovery.
We're concerned with how to perform delivery in San Francisco, yet... can you imagine the vast number of computations the universe is performing every time a protein isomerizes? I wager it outweighs all of the computing power we have available to us through modern technology today. The modern smartphone could never compete in this arena; we would be comparing something not even at the level of a bacteria to the most omnipotent of gods. I'm not saying that one day we'll design computers out of polymers in solution. I don't even know if we'll survive as a species long enough to care. I'm just asking you to wonder.
Look to nature. Can you sense how incredibly infinitesimal and primitive we are as a species when you look up at the night sky? We've been feeding off of the cosmologically low hanging fruit, and we're still in the nursery. We spend on average 20 years learning what we need to begin making our cornerstone contributions to society. At that point, how much longer do we remain productive? It's a limited window with which we have to collapse all the reverse salients. Damn shortness of human productive lifetimes, and all of that. Oh well, there's always a new generation with which to start fresh. Rinse, repeat. Stand on a few more shoulders, see a little more of the picture.
Fill your mind with what might be possible. Let it be dissatisfied when you cannot reach a conclusion to a problem. Don't ever put a bound on the type of problems you're curious about. You'll scoff at press releases. Everything in our generation is transient, scaffolding for the next one gestating.
(Sorry for rambling. And also--I still hold that my flappy bird machine not even in the same galaxy when it comes to being as cool as science. It's a toy for which there will always be one better. How could it ever be so magnificent as the universe I get a few short years to experience firsthand?)
> publicizing how this works will come back to bite them in the butt
> The difference between a blog comment and a twitter post is negligible.
That said, Twitter just outlined a number of reasons why their case is special. They are a high-availability, high-volume, low-latency service. Twitter's spam solution was designed to handle their very special set of constraints. I think a multi-stage filter complete with asynchronous post-processing jobs would be a bit much for your average Wordpress blog. People just starting out with (say, PHP) probably can't fathom a multiprocess deployment architecture. Not to say they couldn't, but the journey is a long one.
I love this quote, and I'm totally going to steal it.
There's just something about the futurists and singularity folks that mimics the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you learn, the more you recognize that we're still operating on Cro-Magnon brains. All of our magnificent toys are merely low-hanging fruit in deference to the problems that seem to really matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budding
Even with normal binary fission, there is never an equal distribution of products between cells. Metabolite concentration, organelle distribution, etc. will vary. (If you think about it, it's kind of an interesting period of rough perturbation made to an extremely high-order dynamical system.)
At a kind of base level, though, the genome itself regularly experiences abnormal partitioning that leads to certain interesting states.
It's not strictly binary...
But back to the previous topic. Epithelia and endothelia are regularly dividing cell types. (It's interesting that most cancers arise from these lineages, right?) Blood cells are another lineage that undergo pretty frequent proliferation.
(On an entirely unrelated note, I can't wait for an HN discussion pertaining to quantum effects on biological systems--it's a topic I really want to learn more about. The absorption spectra discussions in the retinal thread has awoken my curiosity. For instance: though it's kind of a controversial, maybe even a pseudo-scientific topic, the quantum effects on microtubules are fun to think about and are still actively researched.)
Here are some absorption spectra [3] of crystals of various rhodopsin isomers. I'm not sure if any of these are biologically relevant isomers, but it's interesting that these were not in solution. (I suppose that since they're membrane-bound GPCRs and might be difficult to study in solution? This isn't my field of study.)
Check out some bacterial absorption spectra [4]. Visual perception isn't limited to organisms with eyes. Or even eukaryotes, for that matter. It's actually pretty ancient [5].
On that note, pigment chemistry is pretty fascinating.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_protein-coupled_receptor The GPCR family is really cool. A ton of our sensory perception arises from class A GPCRs. Here's a really beautiful diagram of the 7 transmembrane regions of rhodopsin: http://physrev.physiology.org/content/physrev/81/4/1659/F1.l...
2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210271X13... Just to cite an instance, though this one isn't vision-related.
3. http://www.pnas.org/content/103/44/16123/F1.expansion.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose
Edit: From this [1] non-scholarly source,
"The median lethal dose (LD50 value) of vitamin A injected intramuscularly
in a water-miscible form in the young monkey is 0.6 mmol (168 mg) retinol/kg
body weight. Extrapolated to a 3-kg child and a 70-kg adult, the total LD50
dose would be 1.8 mmol (500 mg) and 41 mmol (11.8 g) respectively."
[1] http://www.uta.edu/faculty/sawasthi/Lecture%20Notes%20Chem14...
I suppose you can do this for a cell in a terminally differentiated state of your choosing. (But as you know, pre-cancerous cells are typically in fuzzy states that break our tidy little metabolic models.)
Medicine typically only knocks on the door with extracellular signaling. The cell remains a black box. Even if it weren't, with cancer we'd have to select certain cell populations based on internal cues that may never be exposed. Then there's the structure and pharmacology problems--there's a lot of chemistry and calculus along the path from drug introduction.
There's the known linkage.
This says nothing about the runtime dynamics or higher order interactions, which involve heavy calculus.
This says nothing about the biochemistry under anything but isolated laboratory conditions.
This also doesn't deal with anything above the cellular level. In fact, these are just chemicals in solution--none of the intracellular systems with their own local chemistries are modeled here, and those are maddeningly complicated in their own right. If you think our biological understanding has progressed to the point where gleaning simple information about single edges in this graph are elementary, think again.
Most people have heard about the genome, for which we now have punchcard-level technology to deal with. The methylome sits on top of that, annotating the genome with important dynamic state. Then there's the transcriptome--utilizing nucleic acids, it's just one instance of intracellular messaging. The RNA field is extremely complicated due to its chemistry, which makes it annoyingly difficult to study. (Also, RNA isn't just messaging.)
Want to get at some systems-level interactions? There are the metabolome, reactome, interactome... And we're still at the sub-cellular level. I didn't even mention proteins, which seem to be somewhat important to the study of cancer. (Actually, entire immunological systems are. Yet we're still discovering new immune cell types and guessing at roles...)
If it wasn't something you already had an appreciation for, you can now see that the biology state machine is beyond your wildest dreams complicated. And really, this is glossing over things. You have to take into account a metric ton of chemistry. Unlike programming, nothing ever gets abstracted away in biology.
Welcome to the defining problem of the human race--solving it, if we ever do, will likely be our grandest moment.
If I could make the bet, I'd wager we won't have a cure to cancer in 200 years.
I'd really like to see a blockchain-based distributed ride service though. Drivers get 100%, but the issues of insurance, reputation, etc. would be hard.
http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differ...
I'd be interested to read any studies with alternative outcomes. This seems like a well-promulgated meme, regardless of its factuality or not...
Since users can put small arbitrary byte data in a transaction that gets included in the block chain (AFAIK), isn't it possible that an attacker could insert illicit / illegal data that everyone using Bitcoin replicates?
Copyrighted materials, sensitive personal information such as SSNs, and moreover, child pornograpy immediately come to mind as things that could forever be persisted.
If this is possible, wouldn't that make everyone using the bitcoin blockchain criminally liable for storing and/or transmitting that information? (In the US and similar jurisdictions.)
I assume lightweight clients that only store a hash would be unaffected. But still, this seems like a serious issue.
Issue a master session cookie at login.mydomain or account.mydomain. If your user hits a subdomain and is not logged in, forward them there (in the background) and see if you can grant them a redeemable token for the round trip. If so, they can get a cookie issued by the subdomain in exchange for the token when they return.
But what do I know? I don't use social media or willingly look at ads.
If we'd have come up with a semantic document interchange markup, information would probably be searchable (without Google), computable, and easily discoverable.
In the end, I think it's the user that should determine how to style and display their content. The UI/UX should be software we're free to interchange. Like back in the 90's.
I like that you've outlined key areas for different platforms--that's something I hadn't previously given much thought to. Great analysis.
Do you see anything helping to break us free of this technological local maxima?
Untitled Advanced Science Show Lecture Series
We're Atlanta-based and in need of some biology, chemistry, and physics PhDs (or students; perhaps even really good grads).
We want to film 15 minute science lectures that are much more advanced than Cosmos or NOVA, but we need research and writing. Existing formats are drawn out; we can be informationally dense and fast-paced. We'll include a few relevant figures; we'll also add footnotes, equations, and primary literarure citations for those that want to pause and do their own further exploration.
A perfect description of our demographic is HN--educated adults who might not actually be pursuing the field we're covering but have a ton of interest in science. This market also includes advanced college and high school students that likewise share the same level of interest.
The lectures can be broad surveys or deep coverage of a particular area of research or discovery. We're going to fund filming about 3 videos, film them here in Atlanta, and then test the market for fit (ie. "Show HN"). If the market demands a less "smart" or info-dense video, we'll probably abandon the project. Our goal is to fill the perceived lack of advanced material, not clone the existing formats.
bt at brand dot io
Above all, get them interested. If you capture their imagination, they'll be receptive to--even independently curious about--the details.
I'm speaking anecdotally now, but please do not bore young students. There's no way I would have stuck with it if C was my first language. Javascript and Python are excellent starting points that easily let kids create games and websites and fun things.
We probably wouldn't start someone off with Haskell, but to me C seems on the same level of impracticality for a young beginner.
You'll probably have to supply exogenous substrate for this to work. Additionally might need a super long exposure.