Hacker News Reader

emwon StackOverflow unwinding?

It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses, e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and 'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs.

emwon How SoundCloud built its new single-page main website using Backbone.js

What support does SoundCloud's new single-page interface have for IE8 and IE9? Does the new interface use the HTML5 History API to enable state/page transitions? If so, what fallback technique was used for non-HTML5 browsers? Do these browsers get a single-page interface enabled via URL fragment identifiers (#'s), or do they fall back to a multi-page interface where page transitions are handled as they traditionally have been on the web?

Is there any data on how much SoundCloud's transition to a single-page interface decreased latency during navigation relative to the traditional page-loading model?

Apologies if these questions have obvious answers. I tried to sign up for the beta but the party was full, and I'm not familiar with SoundCloud's interface.

emwon Coffee and Caffeine Help Prevent Alzheimer's

"Additionally, complete data on ApoE status, education level, ethnicity, dietary habits, and lifestyle choices were not available for all study participants, so none of these can presently be eliminated as contributory to the results observed."

Background on ApoE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apolipoprotein_E#Alzheimer.27s_.... I'd be interested to see how participants' ApoE status relates to these results.

emwon Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.

I second the idea that this doesn't sound like machine learning. I wouldn't be surprised if there were no machine learning or data mining algorithms involved in Facebook mapping EXIF-embedded geographic coordinates in digital photographs and suggesting locations for an album based on points-of-interest near those coordinates.

Maybe some neat work with GIS enabled this, but I don't see anything that strongly indicates machine learning.

emwon [dead]

It would be nice to see measurements on how much less time and memory the more performant techniques take compared to their less performant counterparts in realistic scenarios. Doing so might indicate a better ranking of the tips given. For example, the DOM insertion tip -- which drastically improves performance over the naive implementation -- is tip 9, and is probably far more useful than tips 4 (Optimize selectors for Sizzle’s ‘right to left’ model) and 5 (Use find() rather than context).

emwon Please Donate to the Internet Archive

There's a pie chart titled 'Where Your Money Goes' displayed on the donation page (http://www.archive.org/donate/index.php).

Expense ratios for Internet Archive:

    Programs: 88%
    Administration: 10%
    Fundraising: 2%

emwon Wikipedia traffic statistics for Hacker News (or any other article)

You can view traffic for the last 30 days at http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Hacker_News.

I agree that seeing page view counts on a weekly or monthly basis would be interesting. I'll add a feature to http://toolserver.org/~emw/wikistats/ so that users can "bin" view counts for pages into weekly or monthly (or arbitrary-time length) units. If you have other feature requests, please keep them coming.

emwon Wikipedia traffic statistics for Hacker News (or any other article)

http://toolserver.org/~emw/wikistats/ is an augmented traffic statistics tool that shows daily Wikipedia page traffic over arbitrary time periods. It also allows users to see traffic for multiple articles in a given time period, or different language versions of the same article, and gives summary statistics for each data set and some very basic automated inferencing on the cause of traffic spikes (e.g. Michael Jackson's). The tool gets its data from stats.grok.se.

http://toolserver.org/~emw/wikistats/?p1=Hacker_News&pro...