It’s an interesting blog, he seems well read, but surely he knows better than “Plato lived in a placid static Greek aristocratic world.” Plato lived through the execution of Socrates, the fall of the Athenian democracy, the tyranny of the Thirty, the humiliation by Sparta, the demolition of the walls. I’ll grant him “aristocratic”, but that’s all he gets. Makes me wonder whether he mischaracterized Zarathustra too, and my suspicion is yes.
The blog is not a safe place for the overly literal mind. You must accept the glib overstatement and the poetic lie. There’s a reason he caused a paroxysm among the rationalists.
What then am I meant to take away from the piece on Zoroastrianism? I don’t know enough about the subject to navigate to the point around the distortions.
Seeing a Substack email collection box where you have to agree to whatever its terms are to subscribe with a skip to content link of "No, I'm a coward" is... an experience. I'll take your word he's an excellent writer, if there's an RSS feed maybe I'll subscribe.
I haven't used asm.js and compared it to WASM myself, so I'm curious to understand your statements here.
Regarding runtime performance, you said "Javascript isn't drastically slower than WASM in most situations."
So are you saying that the reason WASM exists is to have faster compile times than asm.js, or marginally faster runtime perf in most situations, or drastically faster runtime perf in rare situations?
- Both WASM and asm.js don't incur JS garbage collector overhead, but it's also possible to write (mostly) garbage-free Javascript by hand.
- Both WASM and asm.js don't use Javascript objects or strings (only numbers), and especially not JS objects where the interior structure changes randomly - which in turn might cause JIT recompiles, but it's also possible to write such 'static' Javascript by hand, especially when using Typescript.
That's basically about the claim 'Javascript performance can be close to WASM'. It's possible to write JS manually which is 'optimization-friendly', but is not necessarily idiomatic JS - the extreme version of this optimization-friendly JS is asm.js, but nobody would want to write that by hand.
Then of course WASM pushes the optimization wall a bit further then what's possible with JS, which may increase the performance gap in very specific situations:
- WASM has native 64-bit integers (JS has BigInt now, but I don't know if they optimize as well under the hood)
- modern WASM has SIMD instructions, which was once an ECMAScript proposal, but has been abandondend in favour of WASM SIMD: https://github.com/tc39/ecmascript_simd
Finally there's the historical angle (e.g. "why does WASM exist in the first place"):
TL;DR:
- with the end of native plugins, Java and Flash in the browser, people were looking for new alternatives to Javascript in the browser
- around 2008(?) Emscripten demonstrated that compiling C/C++ to a subset of Javascript can give surprisingly good performance
- this subset was then formalized into asm.js and browsers started to add specific optimizations for that subset (via "use asm")
- but this JS subset was a dead-end in the long run because requirements for a "Javascript-as-compile-target" clashed more and more with "Javascript-as-programming-language"
- ...so a split was made and WASM was created, from now on, Javascript could focus again to be a programming language, and WASM could focus on being a compile target
Good catch. Unfortunately my RSS app isn’t displaying the feed. First time I’ve ever encountered this. I’ve reached out to Unread app developer to see if there’s a fix.
LOL. I had Unread’s developer communicating with me via email. He was trying to help me troubleshoot for a day when all of a sudden magically the articles appeared. Haha. I mentioned to him maybe you saw my comment, before I saw your message. So funny. Anyways, thank you as I really wanted to follow your blog. Much appreciated.
I witnessed a recent front page link silently get changed to point to a parody video, then silently changed back later, with the top comment that remarked on the change silently removed.
That told me all I needed to know about the moderation of this site.
If what you require from an internet forum is that the moderators under no circumstances will ever commit a copy/paste error, HN is definitely below your standards.
Edit: the mods would like to share that they weren't drunk when they made that mistake, just rushed and watching a rather gripping tennis final.
That prompted me to check other dates in the archive: apparently the "Startup News" title lasted for around six months before changing to "Hacker News". I was pretty sure the change was before I made my account, but I didn't realize the "Startup News" period had been so short.
I expected a matter-of-fact explanation of a simple error, and a comment thread that was collapsed - exactly what I found. reductum implied there wasn't an explanation and that the complaining comment thread had been deleted without comment, both of which were hard to believe, so I went looking.
You just need to move your game theory to a different level. The expected value of lying about such things is super negative and the expected value of telling the truth is super positive.
I'm sure there's a model in which lying some of the time but not too often has marginally higher expected value, but it's also going to have significantly higher risk and that's not worth it, plus you have to be disciplined enough to actually apply such a strategy. One slip and you're dead! I'm too lazy for that.
My point is obviously that you’d tell a lie that looks like the truth people want to believe. Which when you get away with it is the biggest EV of all.
You could 100% edit any post you want here and replace it with a link to a funny YouTube video and call it a fat-finger typo and get away with it. There’s no risk for you (as long as you don’t try it too often).
That would be reckless. We must estimate risk differently.
Btw the more accurate reason why we don't do things like that is that we don't want to because it would feel bad. It's not who we want to be. However, the actual reason doesn't always have much persuasive power and when I'm sensing that's the case, I use the cynical argument ("not in our interests", basically), because it's also true. But as the cynical argument isn't persuading you, maybe I should switch back!
YC's a business and operates HN in the end for business reasons*. I don't have a problem with calling that marketing, but I'm puzzled why you bring that up in this context.
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