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venningon JavaScript- Lodash vs Js function vs. for vs. for each

You have always been able to convert them with:

  Array.prototype.slice.call(htmlCollection);

Which has been the canonical way to cast them. But it will still throw on null or undefined.

venningon JavaScript- Lodash vs Js function vs. for vs. for each

Not mentioned here, but worth considering: Lodash's forEach works on "array-likes" not just proper Arrays.

It works on `arguments`, it works on strings (iterating through characters), it works on objects (passing the key as the iteratee's second parameter in place of an index value), it works on HTMLCollection pseudo-arrays. It also doesn't throw on null or undefined.

venningon The world split into 7 equal areas of population

Original source: https://xkcd.com/1389/

venningon Swedish Academy Won’t Award Nobel Prize in Literature This Year

It did for me just now. Android phone, web link into Incognito Mode, open AMP link. Full text.

venningon Adding BigInts to V8

There's a related article linked in OP that answers your questions: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/bigint

When mixing Number and BigInt, abstract equality (==) works fine, but strict equality (===) is always false, since they are two different primitive types.

Most bitwise operators are allowed, so long as all operands are the same type (Number or BigInt). The only exception is zero-fill right shift (>>>) since that doesn't make any sense with respect to BigInts.

From my console: (node 10 with --harmony-bigint)

  > 1n == 1
  true
  > 1n === 1
  false
  > 12345n >> 1
  TypeError: Cannot mix BigInt and other types, use explicit conversions
  > 12345n >> 1n
  6172n
  > 12345n >>> 1n
  TypeError: BigInts have no unsigned right shift, use >> instead

venningon Introducing .app, a more secure home for apps on the web

Alphabet made $31B in revenue last quarter. [1] CydeWeys already addressed their costs, but $100M over 10 years doesn't exactly sound like something they get out of bed for, especially considering they're already out $25M and they really will have expenses to cover for this.

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2018Q1_alphabet_earnings_releas...

venningon Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving

I have often cited the NYT Interactive team for creatively designed articles, but this one has serious problems.

On a modern Android phone, I can't see all of the article text, with an undetermined amount being cut off at the bottom. Swipe back doesn't work if you don't start the swipe from the center of the page (which is unnatural and not the same for swiping forward). There are no obvious affordances to indicate that tapping on the left brings me back. And an un-dismissible subscription dialog appears, obscuring almost all remaining text.

I'm just assuming that it renders perfectly for iPhones. Serious question: is testing for Android just not done?

venningon The quadratic formula and low-precision arithmetic

> The quadratic equation violated the cardinal rule of numerical analysis: avoid subtracting nearly equal numbers. The more similar two numbers are, the more precision you can lose from subtracting them.

Are there other "rules" like this, regarding numerical analysis? I understand this, but I've never thought of articulating it like that.

venningon Tesla's Simultaneous Brilliance and Incompetence Revealed in Teardown of Model 3

> Everything that's below the floor pan is amazing. Everything above it is what it is.

Honest question: Is everything below the floor pan designed and built by Panasonic?

venningon Go's New Brand

The gopher didn't go away. You can find it on pages 21 & 22 of the new Brand Book: https://storage.googleapis.com/golang-assets/go-brand-book-v...

venningon Ford to Stop Selling Every Car in North America but the Mustang and Focus Active

This refers to sedans and coupes, excluding crossovers, trucks, SUVs, and commercial vehicles. But it does appear they will create new "silhouettes" between cars and crossovers. From the Press Release [1]:

> Building a winning portfolio and focusing on products and markets where Ford can win. For example, by 2020, almost 90 percent of the Ford portfolio in North America will be trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles. Given declining consumer demand and product profitability, the company will not invest in next generations of traditional Ford sedans for North America. Over the next few years, the Ford car portfolio in North America will transition to two vehicles – the best-selling Mustang and the all-new Focus Active crossover coming out next year. The company is also exploring new “white space” vehicle silhouettes that combine the best attributes of cars and utilities, such as higher ride height, space and versatility.

[1] https://media.ford.com/content/dam/fordmedia/North%20America...

EDIT: The press release from which all this interest is coming may only refer to Ford North America's development goals. Ford Europe is almost a different company and is responsible for most (all?) of the Focus and Fiesta's development. Perhaps Ford NA will stop bringing new sedans/coupes to market (excepting Mustang and Active) and simply import the smaller vehicles.

venningon PagerDuty (YC S10) now at $100M in ARR

Back of the envelope guesses for my own satisfaction:

">$100MM yearly" is, let's say, $8.5MM monthly.

">10,000 customers" is <15,000 (or they would have used that), so maybe 11,000 to 13,000.

That's around $650-$750 per customer per month.

"Hundreds of thousands of active users" means maybe 250,000-400,000.

That's 20-35 users per customer, when split between 11,000-13,000 customers.

That comes out to $21-$34 per user per customer per month, average (you can see pricing tiers here: https://www.pagerduty.com/pricing/).

(I don't know if they make money off contracts not available on their pricing page.)

venningon Ask HN: Is Hacker News GDPR Compliant?

'sctb did state that they are "working on" a way to decouple the content from the username/email which should allow them to delete user accounts without removing their content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661687 (plus the context two comments higher in the thread).

venningon Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

Data Warning: 100 MB.

Viewing the header illustration for more than a few seconds crashes my iPad Safari tab. Scrolling until it is off the viewport prevents this.

EDIT: Dev Tools reports 74.8 MB transferred with an ad blocker. The illustration is a single 69.2 MB gif.

EDIT: 101 MB in total when you scroll to the bottom. Three more gifs: 18.1 MB, 7.1 MB, 4.7 MB.

venningon Building a Text Editor for a Digital-First Newsroom

The author does not say "work in a text editor", only "use". Considering she's including text editors on mobile devices, which the majority of America will utilize today, that's not a particularly bold statement.

venningon Ask HN: Will my comments/topics on HN be deletable under the GDPR law?

Questions I've had about this:

How does the allowance of comment/submission deletion affect HN being perceived as a "permanent record"? I've always found this aspect of HN to be important to me.

If comments can be deleted selectively, what effect does that have on the permanent record? How many users would be tempted to write something they don't want recorded permanently simply to judge responses before they delete the comment later? (As opposed to requiring that all comments for a user be deleted together, which would likely discourage deletion to remove specific comments.)

Would this give rise to third-party "comment recovery" services that scrape something like archive.org (assuming it is less affected by the GDPR) or maintain their own records to piece together comment threads with deleted comments? Similar to services that archive tweets that might get deleted.

venningon SoftBank Group and Saudi Arabia plan to spend $200B building a solar power plant

> It would satisfy 10% of the world's demand of electricity.

That doesn't sound right. According to the (better) article from Bloomberg [1], "Saudi Arabia’s electricity generation capacity ... stood at 77 gigawatts in 2016", which that article points out is a third of this new project's.

I don't work in electrical production, but I don't think this capacity will work for 10% of the world. Wikipedia [2] agrees with your assessment of ~2300GW for worldwide average production; but I think the problem is how an average production number is calculated as compared with quoted output numbers for a given installation.

EDIT: Hmm, if Saudi Arabia produces ~3.3% of the world's electricity currently, then maybe this does represent enough for a substantial percentage of the world's population, assuming the production and capacity numbers are comparable. (Deriving 3.3% from 77GW of 2311GW, which I recognize come from different years.) Anyone who knows more about this care to weigh in?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/saudi-ara...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Product...

venningon SoftBank Group and Saudi Arabia plan to spend $200B building a solar power plant

"Son" is mentioned twice in the article with no reference to who that is. Masayoshi Son is the man standing on the left in the photo. According to Wikipedia [1] he is founder and CEO of SoftBank.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masayoshi_Son

venningon [dead]

I'm assuming the poster ran up against an ~80 character limit to the title, but leaving out "wrong" makes the article feel more click-baity than necessary.

Perhaps removing "hacking" or "controversy" from the title to make room for "wrong" would preserve the author's original intent without editorializing.

EDIT: Removing either of those would also likely leave room to re-include "the" before "CA", as is in the original, in addition to "wrong".

venningon Leaked email shows how Cambridge Analytica and Facebook first responded in 2015

I believe the "(2015)" label is intended for articles from 2015. This article is from 2018, but its contents reference 2015. Perhaps a better title would be "Leaked email shows how Cambridge Analytica and Facebook first responded in 2015".

venningon What We Found When X-Raying Some MLB Baseballs

If you scroll down further in the article, you'll see that those are cropped images of the cores. The cropping is off-center, not the cores. Otherwise, they would wobble terribly when thrown or hit.

venningon Elon Musk’s Boring Company Gets Preliminary Permit for NYC-DC Hyperloop

That's a few blocks from a Metro stop, but really a terrible place for any kind of real foot traffic. That's near a high-traffic intersection [1] that can be difficult to navigate by car and very slow to navigate by foot.

It's also near a lot of new construction (like most of DC) geared mostly towards young, rich professionals (like most of new DC).

[1] The intersection was changed a few years ago from insanely dangerous to safe but very indirect when trying to make certain transitions.

venningon The Kessler Syndrome Explained (2014)

Needs a (2014) tag.

venningon The city I write this in protected its name, so I am not allowed to use it

I believe that the GP is referring to the other "and", the one here: "the emblem and the name of the City of Sarajevo".

venningon DC police used sonic cannon to direct crowd flow during Women's March

Potentially, DC Police may own these devices due to DC being home to a large deaf population. I believe DC has the highest deaf population, as a percentage of the whole, among all major US cities.

DC Police began installing "Rumbler" systems in police cars ten years ago, partly to help the deaf population identify when police cars were present. [1]

I could imagine a situation where someone on the city/police council saw the LRAD devices as potentially useful in the event of a largely-deaf protest, as happened in 2006.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10...

venningon State of Startups 2017 Survey Results

This quote demonstrates a VC firm (First Round) questioning and implicitly belittling founders who expressed feelings of being discriminated against by VC firms. Really shouldn't be surprising given the rest of the survey results, unfortunately.

venningon Hcrknews.com (Flagged / Censored content can be seen)

That's a fair point.

venningon Hcrknews.com (Flagged / Censored content can be seen)

I, for one, don't like the idea of readers having the ability to narrow what they read here. Part of what I value about HN is that it forces me to see what the community values. It's why I dislike Facebook's and Google's news feeds so much. I can control what I see there, either directly with settings or indirectly by liking topics.

I would rather not be trapped in an echo chamber, even if it is one of my own making (especially if it is one of my own making).

Note, "dead" comments are usually dead for reasons that have nothing to do with the same controversies. Turning off "dead" comments is, at least to me, a very different thing than turning off political submissions.

venningon Hcrknews.com (Flagged / Censored content can be seen)

I also doubt that it was flagged because it would generate low-quality discussion. But I do not doubt that low-quality discussion would have followed had it not been flagged off the front page.

I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more powerful tool (comments) poorly.

venningon Hcrknews.com (Flagged / Censored content can be seen)

To create an intentional false dichotomy: if I have to choose between a site that surfaces all content regardless of controversy but accepts that related discussions will be lower-quality, and a site that directly or indirectly suppresses some content to maintain higher-quality discussion overall, I will choose the latter.

I appreciate that some people feel that the "loss" of some submissions due to automatic flamewar detection algorithms or user flagging is a problem, but I, for one, appreciate that the discussions that remain on the front page (for a long time) have a reasonable guarantee of being high quality.

Relatedly, it may also have an effect on the non-controversial submissions by establishing that flamewars will not remain in high positions for long. (I realize that's a bit of a "broken windows theory".)