skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ActionScript 3.0 is what JavaScript should be. Actual classes, typed variables, and a platform that works the same in every browser.

Contrarian view but I see flash improving its lead on html. Adobe doesn’t have to deal with a bureaucratic standards body and can act decisively when making platform changes. Ex: I’d like to see MS, Mozilla, IE, Chrome, Apple, Opera all agree to implement similar features in Flash 11 (and work the same in each browser). Then I’d like to see them agree on new feature sets when Flash 12, 13, 14 come out etc.

I just don’t see how five browser vendors can equal the agility of one flash vendor. Too much red tape in the html congress…

Yes, Flash is proprietary and it doesn’t work well for mobile. All I can say is that I’ve been burned one too many times by IE not showing CSS table borders on empty cells (last time I checked IE8 still requires that damned ampersand in each cell!). I’m fed up with browser incompatibility. All of the JavaScript frameworks (and now with Google making Dart) confirm that JavaScript is inherently outdated and broken. I gave up on html for Flex and am not looking back.

Just my humble opinion…
It would be cooler if I unplug on phone from dock to leave, the desktop computer Facebook music would switch to mobile device seamlessly.
Definitely agree with #1 but teenagers still do video chat so hangouts could take off.
Am I the only developer who thinks this looks like their own job (albeit with different technology and health insurance)?

My job breaks down to something like 25% tech support, 65% fixing other people's bugs, 10% developing new features. Maybe I'm just bad at managing my career or something.
Does that require changing the mailing address to BPAY?
There's actually a very small difference.

They both result from signing an agreement between said parties, and basically provide the same benefits to both parties (given that most people won't install an operating system themselves).

Except one leaves a choice to the end user, and the other doesn't.
Any chance of video becoming available? The slides were awesome and colorful and I'd love to hear the words that went along with them.

Great stuff! =)
Shouldn't the Safe To Spend have changed when you scheduled 20 buck a payment to adam?
It didn't take a seer to imagine that having camera access was a good idea, but it takes a pretty boneheaded committee to wait this long to do it. Hell, Adobe put camera access in Flash years before iOS even existed. I don't love Flash, but even they benefitted from have a single owner.

Lots of good things coming to the platform now, but progress was even faster in the mid-90's when Netscape and IE were growing up. IE4 and IE5 in particular had a lot of great features that have since been forgotten, and are only now being reconsidered for standardization. Remember behaviors, image filters, CSS expressions, and data binding?
I use Alliant Credit Union, and they allow deposit of scanned checks online. I have used my phone to take the pictures before, and they were accepted.
We have the same thing in Sweden, in addition to direct debit and being able to pay for things (while shopping online) instantly via your online banking instead of using your credit card. It all uses industry standards so that any bank or merchant can hook into it.

The banks here also back an online ID system which has the same legal status as a signature, meaning you can sign up for various banking/insurance etc things online. The same ID system is also used to file taxes online.

Whenever I read about banking in the U.S., it strikes me how incredibly outdated it is. Outside of the U.S. I don't think I've ever seen a paper cheque.
What’s Your Favor?
Favors are not just for weddings, birthdays or anniversaries. Favors are actually essential in every occasion, be it for a simple party for friends, annual celebration of friendship, company gatherings or spur of the moment activities with officemates or classmates. They are the perfect means for you to extend your words of thanks to your guest. It is a means of making these people feel extra special and important. As people love receiving gifts, it would be much appreciated if the words of thanks are expressed through simple gifts.
However, being thoughtful should not cost as much. There are various favors in the market that could effectively gratitude without spending much. Here are some inexpensive favors to give.
Personalized Key Chains. One of the great rules to follow when choosing party favors is practicality and use. Opting for favors that might not be needed by guests is like throwing your money away. Opt for favors that could be used in daily life. Key chains are simple and cheap. But add character by designing it in a way that it symbolizes you or your event.
Loot Bags. Wouldn’t be exciting to receive something in a bag? Put sweets or chocolates inside a personalized loot bag that carries your event’s name. This would create excitement and anticipation to your guests.
*Neoprene koozies. Blank koozies are available in the market both online and offline. These are very effective favors as they can be personalized by the event holder. It comes in various colors and could be customized in many ways. It is a well-loved favor usually used during bachelor and bachelorette parties, birthdays and beach weddings. Beer bottle koozies are hot during summer and camo koozies are suitable during the cold winter.
Koozie Revolution is the maker of high quality koozies. They have the ideal favor for every type of guest which can make great additions to a party bag, or even to give exclusively to the younger guests at another event. You can tailor your favors to your guests needs and make sure that everyone receives the perfect gift for them.
If you are planning a corporate event and require favours or place card holders we can help! Whether it be a summer ball or a Christmas party, we are experienced in dealing with bulk orders.
I have been wanting a feature like this for a long time. The ability to share the listening experience even if you and your friend are not in the same physical space is awesome beyond belief. I hope that it is international and has a variety of tracks to choose from.

Even better would be the ability to listen to a communal playlist at real time. This way two people can toss tracks back and forth and just spread the joy of their favorite tracks.
> Wouldn't this draw anti-trust battles? Since complying with EFI signing is against the license of one of the only other major alternatives to Windows, this would not bode well for Microsoft.

And who do you expect to pursue this anti-trust?

The US government?

Oh, I didn't realize you were joking! ha ha, funny.

The US government is owned by big corps, MS being one of them. Something really weird has to happen for them to turn against their corporate masters. (And don't compare it to the previous anti-trust case - at the time, microsoft wasn't lobbying and paying, sorry, donating to, politicians from both parties)
It sounds like both questions and answers are scripted.

Edit: that was my impression in the beginning of that show.
After warming up the questions became deeper and more interesting.
But was the browser monoculture to blame?

The web went through a painful stale period from about 2000 to 2005, during which time IE asserted near total dominance. However, sites are just now starting to phase out IE6 support. That means that the technology that has advanced the web over the past five or so years was there all along.

Interest in the web started to return around the same time Firefox started to gain in fanfare, but why? Was Firefox to thank? Those "Web 2.0" apps could have just as easily been developed in IE6 in 2001. It wasn't the technology that Firefox brought that made the difference.
Do-it-yourself Pool Problems
Upkeep of a backyard pool is ideally done in a weekly basis. Common problems with pool water require immediate attention, while issues on the pool structure itself can be delayed until your next break. But to be able to maintain the beauty and the satisfaction that you get during your pool recreation, all of these problems should be mended and given utmost attention.
Maybe one of the problems that a pool owner has to encounter is green algae formation and cloudy water. Green algae create a slimy feel on the pool surface and this problem is usually caused by poor filtration system or inactive levels of sanitizer. The good news is that, this could be fixed easily! Check the ph of your pool. Adjust it if is beyond 7.5. Brush the walls and floors and voila, problem solved.

With age, cracks in pools are apparent. As years pass, your pool would show signs of wear and tear. This problem usually leads to leaks. To prevent this, replacement is needed. For minor problems, this could be fixed without help from professionals. Start the process by cutting the crack area using a grinder or a diamond blade. The crack must be allowed to dry and be free from any substance. Then, it is best to apply a caulk to the crack. Once dried, create sand and cement mixture that would cover the crack. The use of knife or trowel is necessary in this process.
The lining of pools usually have problems too. Town or ripped vinyl liners are common especially if the pool had undergone constant water imbalance. Age is also a reason for this problem. However, the solution for this is easy. The vinyl lining could be mended by purchasing kits that are available in hardware stores. There are different instructions for each manufacturer on how to best patch the line’s tear.

Upkeep of pools is actually easy and does not require help from professional. However, for more complicated problems, it is necessary to consult trusted builders to solve it. Not only that it would require much of your time. But at the same time, prevent further damage on your pools.

Poulson Tile and Masonry is the leading pool repair system in San Diego. They are known for their outstanding workmanship and excellent results. For a trusted builder in San Diego, visit http://poolssandiego.com/.
Yes the slides are very nice. Anyone know what he used to create the deck?
WTF are you talking about? Have you ever seen a Windows box since Windows 95?

Why is it so difficult for people to make a point without making personal remarks?
"It's already a problem. In fact, it is the problem. The web application 'platform' is poor, incoherent, and its proponents highly resistant to the sweeping changes that would be necessary to compete with a native, proprietary platform like iOS."

Which "sweeping changes" are those?

Changes like the ability to draw pixel-by-pixel? Vectors? 3D? (Canvas/svg/webgl)

Changes like higher level form controls? Got some in HTML5. New component model is under discussion now. Better layout of controls? The flexible box model helps a great deal, is already in lots of shipping browsers and is getting further cleaned up now.

Drag and drop? Yep.

How about the automatic data binding that's so cool in Cocoa? Not only are there application frameworks that do this (SproutCore, Knockout, Batman), there are also proposals like "Model Driven Views" (MDV) which use ECMAScript Harmony Proxy objects to make it cleaner.

What about files? Yeah, there are file APIs. Databases? localStorage is a simple key/value store. There's also WebSQL DB and IndexedDB which will hopefully be resolved in one way or another soon.

APIs for audio and geolocation are there now. Camera and other device APIs are in the works.

So, which sweeping changes do you mean? The ability to compile C code? Sorry, but I don't think most apps need that.

"The browser makers (especially Mozilla) seem insistent on leaving us in the lurch, stuck with JavaScript, the DOM, and the painfully long lead times of standardization."

I can't say this for sure, but I'd be willing to bet that:

a. standardization is moving faster than it has in more than a decade
b. many APIs become usable in the real world well before the standards are complete

To be sure, the web-as-a-platform is not perfect today or in the future. But, its evolution is real.
In user-hours of application use the web is UNQUESTIONABLY the dominant application platform.
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I've actually heard of it (just), probably due to a friend having recently moved to French Polynesia. Caused me to spend some time looking at "the neighborhood" on Google maps.

I wonder whether they are affected by that "three strikes" nonsense currently afflicting NZ. Not that I'm prone to hoist the flag, but dealing with an quasi-arbitrary right (or lack thereof) to connectivity would be a hindrance.

Which also reminds me, connectivity to my friend's island is kind of lackluster and expensive. Guess I need to look at your links in more detail.
I disagree that the web tech should be owned by a company. It seems to me the "committee" has done a much better job the Microsoft alone, so far.

But if there was to be such company, it should clearly be Google. Both Apple and Microsoft don't really have their interests aligned with the web. They make money from hardware or from selling OS licenses. By default, that means that their #1 priority is to do that - and in many cases at the expense of the web. If they would own it, and they would ever have a conflict of interest between the web and their main platform, they would choose their main platform.

But Google have their interests much more aligned with the web. They care about making the web faster, more advanced, and so on, because they indirectly make money from that.

But of course, even Google owning the tech would bring it's own set of problems, and this will happen with any company owning it. Any company who would own it would "corrupt" it in some way, if only to be better for their own products or less good for the others.

That's why the Internet is decentralized in many ways, and it's the beauty of the Internet. We've had many closed platforms before, but none like the Internet. And the Internet is the greatest one by far, and I doubt it's by coincidence.

If you look at other "cross-platform" technologies, like Flash for example, they ultimately fail, because a single owner can't make sure it works on absolutely every platform and browsers, with no problems. It requires too much work.

And again, that's one of the beauties of the web technologies, that every browser has to do their own implementation of the spec as good as possible, and compete with each other for that.

One more thing. Yes, iOS and Android did help bring back to popularity the native applications, but this is not an "ultimate" win. It's just a cycle. We've had native apps when the PC's emerged, then we had web-apps becoming popular. Then the smartphones emerged with slow processors (compared to PC's) and native apps started being popular again. But HTML5 is already starting to become popular on mobiles, and with at least 3-4 platforms, you can be sure the web will "win", at least this cycle, until a new low-performance tech comes along and native apps are back.
I disagree that the web tech should be owned by a company. It seems to me the "committee" has done a much better job than Microsoft alone, so far.

But if there was to be such company, it should be Google. Both Apple and Microsoft don't really have their interests aligned with the web. They make money from hardware or from selling OS licenses. By default, that means that their #1 priority is to do that - and in many cases at the expense of the web. If they would own it, and they would ever have a conflict of interest between the web and their main platform, they would choose their main platform.

But Google have their interests much more aligned with the web. They care about making the web faster, more advanced, and so on, because they indirectly make money from that.

But of course, even Google owning the tech would bring its own set of problems, and this will happen with any company owning it. Any company who would own it would "corrupt" it in some way, if only to be better for their own products or less good for the others.

That's why the Internet is decentralized in many ways, and it's the beauty of the Internet. We've had many closed platforms before, but none like the Internet. And the Internet is the greatest one by far, and I doubt it's by coincidence.

If you look at other "cross-platform" technologies, like Flash for example, they ultimately fail, because a single owner can't make sure it works on absolutely every platform and browsers, with no problems. It requires too much work.

And again, that's one of the beauties of the web technologies, that every browser has to do their own implementation of the spec as good as possible, and compete with each other for that.

I don't think you can do something "cross-platform" without having all the players involved, or as many as possible. How do you ensure the needs of every platform are met? Will Google care about Microsoft's needs for the web? Would Microsoft make HTML specs that take advantage of Apple's hardware? This is why you have a "standards body". Because otherwise the standard would be whatever that company needs and wants from the web.

One more thing. Yes, iOS and Android did help bring back to popularity the native applications, but this is not an "ultimate" win. It's just a cycle. We've had native apps when the PC's emerged, then we had web-apps becoming popular. Then the smartphones emerged with slow processors (compared to PC's) and native apps started being popular again. But HTML5 is already starting to become popular on mobiles, and with at least 3-4 platforms, you can be sure the web will "win", at least this cycle, until a new low-performance tech comes along and native apps are back.
Took a very quick look at Coderay. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like a Regexp-based parser/compiler, rather than any sort of parser with an actual grammar.

To be honest, while my inner nerd shudders at this, it makes a little sense as some of the languages in that list (Ruby) have only recently had formal grammars defined.

That said, I think it would take me more than ten minutes to implement a scanner for F#, which I don't know, using Coderay, which I also don't know.

I could probably get it done in about a day, maybe two for debugging and testing.

There is no way in hell I would spend that kind of time on a job application, and as a nerd that has gone into management, I wouldn't ask an applicant to do so either.

What has worked well for me in the past is to ask for either a link to their GitHub repository, a code sample, or have them solve a quick five-minute problem over Skype or IM.

If the interviewee passes that bar, we then do something more in-depth during the interview as a pair, timeboxed to about half an hour.

This has proven effective at weeding out the untalented and unworkable, without asking potential hires to sacrifice a huge amount of their time.
It depends on what the CEO got.

What bothers me is that it doesn't matter how incompetent Apotheker is and how suicidal his decisions at the helm of HP were, he'll leave it with a lot of money.

If we reward failure like this, how can we expect people to make the effort needed to succeed?
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These obviously planned "leaks" that occur just before a company announces something to get the hype machine in gear are really starting to get tiresome.

At least try something more subtle than having a high ranking creative director "accidentally" tweet the feature.
I think he is underestimating the quantum leap that web technologies have made in the past 2 years.

Between canvas, audio & audio data, video tag, css3, websockets, webworkers, webgl, touchscreen events, and new server tech like nodejs... there are now so many new API's to learn and work with that most web developers haven't even started to catch up yet. There's a lot of room here, the capabilities of the permutations of these technologies together will take years to fully realize. It will take years to write libraries to build the power-features necessary to really take this stuff to the next level.

The power to build a amazing new apps is now here. It took 10 years for this leap to happen. Just give it some time for web developers to catch up.
> Apple didn't choose Clang over GCC for political reasons, a lot of Clang devs are actually on the Apple payroll.. and Clang is just a far superior compiler to GCC architecture-wise -- it just needs a few more years to catch up to full C++11 support.

Do you have any insider knowledge of this? Because the prevailing wisdom around the net is that Apple didn't like to be dependent on a GPL3'd product (which gcc became at some point), so they propped up the only viable alternative at the time, which was LLVM.
An interesting thought experiment is to do a rough-and-ready valuation on real-estate in your area : and see how much (say) Bill Gates could buy.

For instance, $60Bn doesn't buy very much of Manhattan. It's rather disappointing really.
It'd be pretty awesome if he used GitHub to build 'How GitHub uses GitHub to build GitHub'.
It happened immediately after logging on, when looking at the news feed. I was able to see the page for a split second while it first rendered and then some JS covered everything up with mostly-opaque white. I think the popup box was pointing to the update status input box, but I forget what it said.

I just logged in and did not get it, so it seems to be gone now.
WWWF Seeks to Find the Number of Pages on the Web
The slides were very well done. Here's another set not-that-much-related that I found: http://speakerdeck.com/u/pengwynn/p/accelerating-titanium-de....
A Brit here, who has recently established a (B2B) company in the US. The check thing really surprised me too. The USA still loves checks: we receive them for most of the work we do, and make a lot of our payments that way.

From a personal perspective, I rarely use checks, except (and this blew my mind) I can set up a regular payment through my bank's website to a recipient. If the recipient's bank is on a similar system, the transactions are made digitally. If not, then they automatically mail a check each month. Transparent to me, but seriously.
Agreed that the web doesn't have any "magical properties", but it has the "Worse is Better" survival characteristic; or at least it did in its early days. I think the web's continued dominance depends on the extent to which it retains those characteristics.
Personally I would probably consider a wood-cabin hippie commune pretty far removed from 'development'.
They had data binding? I don't remember that (that's a pet feature of mine ;)

From what I've seen, things don't really start in the committees. They start with people at browser vendors scratching their own itches and eventually escape out into the committees. In some ways, that's why it's good that there are 5 organizations pushing forward. One with an itch for camera access will help force the others to take action.

Data binding aside, I do remember the mid- to late-90s and I think the pace is faster now. Perhaps I'm biased since I work for a browser vendor... but I'm not actually a browser developer myself. I'm a web developer. And, I see interesting new capabilities popping up pretty rapidly.
> It was the first one that didn't suck and it was the first one that made money.

That's a bit of a tautology. "It dominates because it was the first to produce a dominant product."
> Give the hardware division a chance to reverse course while it is still not a cash drain on HP.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. How many notebooks did Apple make before having a hit? You build two phones and one tablet that are not hits and you can the whole division?
East Coast Tour starts in 7 Days
KidsRuby on Raspberry Pi – another video demo
2012 Hyundai Veloster Reviews and Buying Tips
You'll look like a trend-setter almost anywhere in the new 2012 Veloster—but you sure won't feel like a fashion victim or elitist
Labeling iOS' Back Button
I'm pretty sure that it would be quite difficult to build a nice common system that can integrate with the backends of many banks.