Nobody was claiming that WASM would replace JavaScript in general, magically or otherwise. I think there's reason to believe it will replace asm.js since it's already being integrated into Emscripten and the major browsers have already landed support in their stable releases.

I find comparing it to Flash or Java applets weird, given the fact that you clearly understand that it doesn't interact with the outside world using any WASM-specific APIs. Both Flash and Java applets could in theory interact with the outside world only via a JavaScript wrapper but that was never the use case they were aimed towards either in theory or practice. Flash and Java applets also used languages that map much better to JavaScript's execution and memory models than C/C++ do, so the APIs were a big part of what you were getting by going that route (especially in Flash's case, where you had to learn a totally different programming language just for Flash).

Unless you consider people who using things like Node.js or Electron to be "insecure about touching C/C++" I don't see where you get off saying that about people who want to use WASM. Sometimes you have existing code or expertise in a certain language, or it simply fits your problem better.

> Nobody was claiming that WASM would replace JavaScript in general, magically or otherwise.

That is literally what I have heard directly on here and Reddit numerous times.

> Unless you consider people who using things like Node.js or Electron to be "insecure about touching C/C++" I don't see where you get off saying that about people who want to use WASM.

I am not saying that about WASM. I am saying that about the people who obsessively NEED for WASM to replace JavaScript and believe this to be a magically solution.

> That is literally what I have heard directly on here and Reddit numerous times.

That's great, then post in response to those comments instead of ones focusing on WASM as a new compilation target. Repeatedly.

WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers.

JavaScript is also a compile target in a sandbox. Emscripten started with outputting plain JS, then that was optimized to asm.js, now optimized to WASM.

I completely agree that WASM should NOT replace JS for normal DOM apps. It's currently possible through awkward calls into JS, and might be possible in the future more directly, but there's no need to replace JS.

> WASM replaces Javascript as the target of other language compilers.

No, it does not. Compiling to WASM is not a replacement or synonym for compiling to JavaScript. JavaScript is not locked in a sandbox, in the same way, as it has a multitude of APIs. WASM does not have such APIs as it is just the sandbox.

Here is the deal. All modern browsers now claim to support WASM. If WASM were capable of replacing JavaScript it would do so right now, but it isn't because it cannot. The demand is certainly there and yet despite that demand the results are completely absent.

People claim this is because WASM lacks DOM bindings. True, but that is only a tiny bit of it. WASM also does not have a security model around code/data distribution. WASM also does not have access to the chrome of the browser (the parts outside the DOM). I also haven't heard much about asynchronous threads in WASM, which is a huge requirement when working with distributed code execution. This list could go on and on.

This is common knowledge for people who do this work professionally. There is an incredible amount of work to do before an arbitrary compile target can replace a major platform consideration, and much of that work isn't API bindings.

The people who claim WASM as a replacement for JavaScript, as evidenced on r/programming, tend to be the people most ignorant and fearful of JavaScript. They want a replacement so badly they assume this is it without any consideration for what the technical requirements are, because they have no idea what they are.

I'm starting to get fed up by the open-ended trust models used by most forum software on the internet.

slashdot started in 1997. phpBB was started in 2000. 4chan accidentally in 2003. reddit was put together in 2005. HN was created in 2007.

I think 2007-2010 was a tipping point where people started to collectively get smarter and more sophisticated on the Web. I'm not saying everyone was dumb before that, but that... you needed to be more cynical and you couldn't just depend on something's ridiculousness to know whether it was fake or not.

4chan maintained a troll mentality that made it obvious some things were real and some were not, and many people there there knows not to believe everything they see - maybe not a 51% majority, but just enough that the integrity of an awareness culture is maintained.

HN got started around the tipping point I just described, which might explain why it's lasted a while.

But all the others... they're based on old ideas, old notions of trust. The culture is based on openness and contemporaneously broken interpretations of the idea of freedom of speech - so anybody gets on there and declaratively makes their point, and everyone believes them like it's tort law and utterly official.

Maybe that's why reddit gets blamed for being a hivemind.

Not quite sure if I'm talking hot air through ten hats here, but I'm just mad there isn't an IQ test to be casually involved in tech because EVERYONE has such crippling levels of "oh no I don't understand this so I'll just believe this thing here and won't fact-check it for myself". At least on reddit this seems to be the case.

Yes, that's really harsh, but I see it as the facts of the situation. If I'm wrong please do let me know.

Its a good point, and a lot broader than tech or online forums.

The end point of "everyone gets an equal say" is noisy, bad consensus, because not everyone deserves an equal say - that invalidates the whole idea of differences in skill/knowledge among domains across people. Its why the modern world uses representative democracies, rather than direct democracies because no one person is qualified (or has enough time) to make decisions about the minutiae of FISA amendments, cooperation treaties between US-Israel space programs and federal food stamp programs at the same time.

I think early HN (and the web) were small enough that only people who really cared used them, so stuff tended to be high-quality even though they were open to all. As audience grows, content gets worse. Quora is another great example of a forum being destroyed by scale.

Plus now that people actually use forums, there are millions of "growth marketers" trying to push their agenda that further muddy the waters and increase noise. The ads, "native" ads, clickfarms, massive networks of sockpuppets and ads masquerading as "content".

I wish I had a solution.. but the only resilient one I see is a real old-school human community. A network of people you trust. Friends basically :p

Also, if anyone has books or pointers to read more about this kind of stuff, please tell me!!!!

> [N]ot everyone deserves an equal say - that invalidates the whole idea of differences in skill/knowledge among domains across people.

What makes me mad is that this isn't even that controversial; people just go straight to "completely offended" about so many things nowadays without accepting that they've leveled-up as much as they have, that discussing things competently must be earned, and that the right to do so should come with the ability.

"Representative democracies" sounds like scalability-speak :P - where I define "scalability" to mean "dropping tons of rounding errors on the floor". (Cuz that's what invariably happens.)

Network "smallness" wasn't really a concrete enough explanation for "works better" to me; I knew there was something extra to be said besides "human networking doesn't scale". This is of course true, but too generalized IMO.

Niche interest provides a slightly more concrete explanation: you're right, only people super-interested in relevant fields (or recommended by word of mouth, perhaps) used to find HN.

And yes, now we have spammers of all kinds. HN is full of the weird ASCII soup ones, I've noticed tons of them of late sadly. But the noise here is greater, and sadly lots of interesting content gets firmly buried the moment it's posted while fluff rises to the top. I wonder how much of the fluff is engineered.

As for a solution to this, I think whole-system analysis could be useful - scraping e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g on a site, all the content and even images, and then being able to cross-reference everything, shove it through arbitrary models, etc. Having everything in once place is I think the key part - this is after all how our brains work, and since this is about human networking I wonder if this isn't at least a good approach to start with.

Nobody seems to be doing this at scale for eg reddit or HN, even though the data is available (reddit has dumps up on bigquery and there are also torrents; and HN's firebase API is officially explicitly non-ratelimited, confirmed via email). Beyond that, looking at for example all of tumblr is something I've wanted to do for a very long time.

Ultimately it's about being able to lose the right information in the summarization process. Summarization is always lossy; but if you lose low-value info then the essence can be reconstructed. (If I summarize this message by dropping everything except for "if" "and" "a" "as" "for" and "I" (etc), the result would be non-reconstructable, for example.)

"Big data" is currently at the pattern-matching stage. The stage I've just described - summarizing consistently - will be the one where people will be falling over each other with new uses etc etc. I think everyone's anthropomorphizing the stage we're at, thinking we're already doing summarization, because it's how we intuitively interpret the idea of pattern-matching (when we aren't actively thinking about the mechanics of it). But we aren't yet.

So for now, we need to do this ourselves, I think. I've been thinking about tagging for many years; del.icio.us absolutely had the right idea with that, it's so sad it's now a broken personal-use-only archive (it got bought by pinboard and is now effectively non-scrapeable D:).

I'm hoping to put a forum of my own together at some point. Considering the speed I do just about anything and the number of ideas I know I want to fold in I know the earliest I'm likely to have anything interesting is probably this time next year (ha). It uses tagging as one of its foundations along with a few other tidbits. (Of course they is sekret, I want the forum to be a surprise :D)

I also have some ideas about web scraping I want to play with at some point. Well, not really web scraping, but more a "bigger picture" type thing that makes scraping interesting/useful. _That's_ a 10-year project, one I've been thinking about since 2003. (I still haven't started it, as I'm still figuring it out. It's not rocket science, it's just getting the intersection of a thousand tiny details right.)

Problem #1 is articulating everything - I have no idea how to describe all my ideas because the only way I know how to write is to describe things with a beginning middle and end. But there's no middle or end because this hasn't happened yet (lol). So I go to write about this and I get completely stuck on the "beginning" part, describing what I'm about to describe in an infinite loop. Hilarious and depressing all at once.

I've recently realized mind-mapping could help there, now all I need to do is get (or build) a mind-mapping system that'll work on my ancient laptop... ("what's a GPU?")

Javascript also does not have access to the chrome of the browser. Unless it's running in a WebExtension context, in which case you can also run WASM there.

WASM can CALL INTO JAVASCRIPT CODE. Which means it can do anything JS can do — in a "clunky hack" kind of way, sure, but people are building sugar on top of this already: https://github.com/koute/stdweb

So it's not the kind of sandbox you're thinking about. It's literally the same sandbox as JavaScript itself.

Also, I just realized — you're probably thinking of "compiling to JS" as in TypeScript/BuckleScript/Elm/ghcjs/ScalaJS/… — and yeah, that isn't easy to replace, because you'd have to implement a whole garbage collected runtime for WASM currently and that's kinda ridiculous.

Others (including me) are thinking of "compiling" as in Emscripten, and WASM was literally created to optimize this at first.