skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like I have just seen the future and it is very bright. This would make mobile development so much easier and open up a completely new range of possibilities.

Just imagine ....

- writing just one app that runs on every desktop and mobile phone out there.

- apps which update entirely automatically, without any extra line of code, because they are basically just cached versions of a website.

- a designer, who just knows CSS & HTML, can make an entirely new GUI for your phone.

- an eco-system where the development of the interface (HTML) is completely separate from the kernel/browser and you can choose which kernels/rendering engine to run on your phone, independent of the user interface and vice versa.

- etc. etc.

Kudos to Mozilla for their vision and for not just developing the technology, but making a good looking prototype to demonstrate it.

However, I am a little bit skeptical that a web-based OS will perform the same as a native OS, especially in terms of battery consumption. But smartphones only get more powerful and html rendering engines only faster, so it can only be a matter of time. Also a little nitpick with respect to the title: the OS not entirely build using HTML, CSS and JS, it's just the user interface, which is just small part of the OS (compared to the kernel, etc.).

EDIT: I know most of this is already possible in principle, but the user / developer experience would be completely different.
While programming I love scribbling down notes and ideas on a notepad. There is something about the change in mindset or context from screen and keyboard to pen and paper that helps me see the whole picture of what I am working on, or even just get a thought out of my head temporarily to be able to stay on the current task. Does anyone else do this, and have you found any piece of technology to replace that?
Hm. Just tried to follow your link (on my iPad). I get a page inviting me to install an app, so I do. After creating an account, the app is basically empty, telling me I have to share some music on my computer. Weird, but ok, so I come back here and try your link again, and I still get the same page asking me to install your app. Is this how it's supposed to work?
You are broadly describing PPAs.

Yes, indeed I am. The point where PPAs fall short is that the user still needs to add a repository when all he wants is to install a package.

I maintain `apt-get install https://foobar.com/pkg` is where it's at. Feel free to query me all you want ("really add this untrusted repo?", "fetch updates from there?", "trust this key?" etc.), but by all means make it a one-liner. Not three, not two, one.

And have proper procedures for all the little corner cases where PPAs fall down. I.e. when the repo goes away or changes URL, when the signing key changes, etc.

It's a matter of polish. Non-technical users need that polish. And technical users like it, too.
It's definitely not enough to judge which platform is superior but Prey is available on the Android Market/Play.
apropos hierarchy

apropos 'file system'
Billion Years Of Cosmic History for All
paper is more basic. everyone can use a pen. you don't lose any time or effort.
Government Explained
`man man` leads you to `man -k "file system"` (or apropos, as mentioned), leads you to ...
Release of Typo 6.1, the oldest Rails blogging engine
We've just released the 6.1 version of Typo, the oldest blogging engine running on Ruby on Rails. It now comes with every feature you would expect from such a software. Time for you to switch from Wordpress?
My new iPad has a yellow tinted screen
I've never understood why no one asked Daisey a simple question. The clothes that he is wearing at the moment, the shirt, pants, undergarments. Where were they most likely manufactured? And does he think plants that manufacture clothing are in any way better than Foxconn?
My guess is no, they are not.
Suggestions for a Proper Girl’s Fashion
The headline implies that C++ as a language is superior to C as far as performance is concerned, whereas all that was shown is that the STL is superior to the libc from a batteries-included point of view.
I can't really see what you're describing. One of those things you have to see in person i guess.
Right 1/4 of the screen is distinctly blue/crisp than the rest. Especially annoying when looking at a white background app like a browser.
It's the carriers. Apple had to give the Wi-Fi Alliance a lot of concessions in exchange for allowing the device on their networks.
As I was watching the video I was thinking the same thing that WebOS has been out for years. I'm sure the underlying technology and framework is quite different from Mozilla, but it's not a ground-breaking idea.

Perhaps they should take the opportunity to work on the newly open sources WebOS which is likely to be able to grab more market share than an entirely new Gecko OS.
There are a lot of "looks promising" comments here. Am I the only one who thinks this does NOT look promising?

Aside from games, rendering a markup language is one the most taxing things we do on our mobile devices. When I get handed a new phone to play with, the first thing I do is load a non-mobile optimized website and see how it scrolls. This worst-case scenario is a good indicator for how laggy and jittery a mobile OS will be at sporadic times throughout the day.

Now a mobile OS built entirely on the worst-case of rendering HTML, CSS, and JS for every interaction? Sure, devices will keep getting faster as time goes on. But keep in mind that as device performance over the years increases, so do our expectations. I am skeptical that this will ever deliver a sufficient user experience when compared side by side to other mobile OSes.
Audiogalaxy looks really good, but I can't find a radio mode. (like last.fm, where you enter a tag / artist and it plays similiar songs) Is there such a thing?
Maybe the photo was not the best taken. A little googling on the yellow new ipad screen has a few hits of other people having this issue.
Unfortunate.
I thought that the general consensus was that you never wanted multiplatform anyway. Not because it can't be done but an app that looks and acts the same on both iOS and android (for instance) will suck horrible on at least one platform (but probably both).

Apps which will update automatically? That's just as possible with native apps but you have the option to turn that off - because it's a bad idea for a lot of applications. In general if you don't respect that as a developer I don't want to use your apps.

You can make an entirely new GUI for android right now if you wanted to. But for the same reason as in my first paragraph, you really don't wan't to fragment your userbase. The GUI guidelines are very important for apps to integrate well, as an app developer you would now have to support all those third party interfaces that will change every five minutes... I wouldn't call that a bright future.

Designing a good GUI is hard and if you have managed to make it easy it is going to be really bad.
I still scribble on paper - I wouldn't feel right if I couldn't put the Pc down for a bit and start scribbling.
Share a Car, Risk Your Insurance
Sometimes it's hard to accept an offer for help even if you know you need it because you are thinking of the amount of work required to accept that help (ie re-skinning). I tend to get bogged down and overloaded myself like that sometimes to my own detriment.

Maybe if you keep trying, or even look at the code and see if you can make a patch file with a few new buttons - that would result in some progress. It would be great because audacity could use some UI love.
One useful addition to the section on streams would have been that of process substitution:

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/process-sub.html

This allows you to have more than just the standard streams.
You can't have a consistent button layout across all games though, as there is far too wide a variety of different functions to be mapped to.

Also, by having the attitude that the user is willing to invest time learning how to use the game, there is far more experimentation in interface styles being done.
Blondes
I find more awesome music, quicker, with Spotify than I ever did with any other music tool. I especially like the apps for this: Pitchfork, Guardian, RollingStone, etc. This combined with checking out what my "friends" are listening to really is a great way to find good stuff.
ArchLinux is a very poor distribution to leave with someone who doesn't have the knowledge to fix these problems.

When you do pacman -Syu you should be looking on the front page for update news, you should be looking at the list of packages to be upgraded. It's not a distribution that will hold your hand, because there are some of us around who don't want our hands held.
There's just one problem with your post: you're thinking like a technologist, and not like an end-user.

Well, a lot of people who use and hack on Linux distros aren't targeting the "end-user," they're targeting the technologist. So that mindset is not necessarily a problem.
Boy, [1] is a long document. I scanned through it quickly and noticed some good ideas, but I don't have the patience to do any of it in the way described. There's too much process.

Have you shipped any of the ideas in [2]?
> I still use Linux on servers, but desktop Linux has largely disappeared from my life.

And you still keep saying that "sound doesn't work". It's literally been years since I've had problems playing sound.

> I get the feeling Linux has been going backwards not forwards.

Hmm, I can play most media out of the box on Linux. I think that's a huge step forward.
Oh, sure, I wasn't referrimg to this case but to tptacek's remark about narrative journalism and the article on Truman Capote he linked to.

And just to make sure: I'm not claiming that a longer, more careful and more rigorous observation does not yield a more accurate approximation. I'm just responding to a common complaint against journalists that if only they would stick to what they've actually observed and can prove that would necessarily produce better journalism; this is wrong.

And as for Nassim Taleb not reading the news, only textbooks - well, I don't have a problem with the first part, but if the obsessive, anal Mr. Taleb insists on only the most rigorous sources for learning about this world, than he has a very limited soul, indeed.
For software updates without updating the distro, backports can be turned on.

The reason that everything is packaged together like that is so library updates and other things can be tested and vetted for compatibility. Part of the challenge of allowing such a variety of OS and system configurations is that library or software package maintainers are unlikely to have tested their updated code on every possible distribution out there, and so that makes it the responsibility of the distro maintainers.

Believe it or not in practice this doesn't create many issues. It might be an obstacle for casual users who are trying to transition into power users, and are trying to tweak their system. But most other users aren't encountering the same frustration.
While that's great, your scribbling on paper while coding can't sustain the enormous empires that were built up around the sale of paper. Things like books and corporate purchases are what did that. And if even just 90% of paper usage is eliminated in those contexts, you'll see those empires come crashing down.
Well, duh. I wasn't claiming the universe is subjective. But you have to accept that not all knowledge and meaning can come from hard data.
They don't exist (yet). Lion supports HighDPI mode, but the Airs have about the same DPIs as the iPad 1/2.
Designing a good GUI is hard indeed and it requires a completely different skill set than the engineering task of writing a good OS/kernel/broswer. That is why ideally the two should be taken on by different teams in my opinion.
Certainly will!
Related to this, pyp is worth taking a look at if you're interested in doing manipulation using python's libraries, but on the command line:

http://code.google.com/p/pyp/
Skydiving... From Space
I'm the author of both MicroJS and Zepto. The sizes are automatically generated from GitHub when I deploy, usually a couple times per week.

Zepto's size includes only the core library, not additions like Ajax, Touch and so on, that's where the 3.3k number is coming from.
It would nice if there was an article to summarize all the ways of emulating a class in Javascript. Over the years I've seen a dozen different ways and I never know what's the pros and cons of them, or at least the principals behind them. All these different ways don't help me when I'm looking at someone else's code. There are just way too many ways to do it.
I also work for Sky (different part) and these guidelines seem mostly sensible to me, so much so I may recommend them to my team, with some caveats:

- Have no problem with IDs if they're used correctly for unique items. The cascade should not be an issue.
- Formatting of css and vendor prefixes - these aren't guidelines they're personal preferences. There's no appreciable maintenance benefit for any of them in my opinion. Each to their own.

I am in favour of dashes too, On a big project you might spend literally 100s of hours writing or editing css, using dashes will save you enough time in keystrokes to have a an extra long lunch by the end of it.
You use debian and are complaining about old binaries? I think they consider it a feature.

I use Ubuntu desktop/server and etc and my experiences with the package managers have been flawless.
I don't understand the benefit of this method using a self object compared to the classical method using this which is so much simpler. This method doesn't make it clearer for people with other OOP languages experience.
> Boy, [1] is a long document. I scanned through it quickly and noticed some good ideas

I understand. It's a whole bunch of neat design processes. But it's huge! You can take a look here for the separate ideas. http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/

> Have you shipped any of the ideas in [2]?

Yup. We're currently building IHeartCode (turned out to be the most popular). A rough prototype lives at http://iheartpy.com
The Linux desktop is dead

This is really premature because there are major flaws with the other options. Apple is a closed-down walled garden (and it's expensive), for example.

The Linux ecosystem is extremely diverse, so maybe somebody will come up with something that can compete well with these other flawed models.

For example, maybe Ingo Molnar's post will inspire people to take things in new directions.

The desktop paradigm will still be around for several years

That's a ridiculous understatement. You can't do serious work on smartphones and tablets and that's not going to change until we're going around plugging them into projectors and keyboards, at which point they're just serving as desktops anyway.
+1. Exactly the same feeling. There was lots of high quality 320k songs and albums there one couldnt find anywhere else... not that I ever used it, of course :)
There's at least two phases of developing code. There's the solving of the problem at hand, and getting the expression of that solution towards syntactically correctness.

Colour syntax highlighting is merely a "live syntax checker" - albeit not as good as a compiler or linter (it's simpler in nature). But the value it adds is sufficient to make it a useful aid. It's the coding equivalent of Word's squiggly red line spell-checker, it draws attention to things that may be issues when the colour highlighting looks odd.

If the colours are distracting, then it is the colours that are the issue, not the concept of syntax highlighting. So subdue them enough.

Colour syntax highlighting is a visual indicator that the code looks syntactically correct. With that as a confidence indicator it's easier to dive into the logic itself, knowing that you're mostly on solid ground syntax wise.

Plus, colour provides quick visual hooks to various parts of the code. It allows skimming through the code to find the prescient part easier. Yes, it makes it easier to skip past commented out code -- those should be deleted at an appropriate point. And it's easier to delete that commented out code when it's colour coded than without.

Developers fight with their code on multiple levels. Colour-coding helps deal with one particular level of that code - syntactic correctness.

Developers know that syntactical correctness doesn't mean the problem is solved. It just means that the attempted solution to that problem is considered syntactically correct.

I think the only interesting point in the author's piece is the point that English text is more difficult to read when it's randomly coloured. When we get to an x-Generation Language levels where we can develop programs in plain English, I'd agree with the author that colour syntax highlighting doesn't add sufficient value at that point. But we are still stuck in a hybrid computer-friendly constrained language constructs, and with those constrains, colour syntax highlighting assists developers to confirm the code is syntactically valid.
We're talking about different problems. Windows does not have the problem I'm describing. If I want to update Firefox on Windows XP, I can do that without Windows forcing me to update to Windows 7 as part of the deal. That's the problem. Updating Firefox on Ubuntu 11.04 after a certain (very soon in the future) point in time necessitates an update to Ubuntu XX.YY.

In fact you're precisely illustrating my point with your example. That people can choose to stick to XP because they don't like 7 is precisely analogous to wanting to stick with Gnome 2 because I dislike Unity. But the difference is that I can do that in Windows because I can still get app updates in XP for over a decade, but I can't in Linux because app updates are tied to the entire massive distro and everything else that goes with it... often every 6 months.

It certainly is possible to upgrade parts of the system using esoteric (to the average-Joe) solutions like PPAs or compiling from source or being forced to switch to a different desktop environment. (Most users don't even know what a DE is!) But the fact that you're forced to turn to such solutions is what I--and the OP and the linked article--argue is the biggest nail in the desktop Linux coffin.
This is not true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_44_of_the_Constitution_...
An Overview of Legendary Lisp Keyboards
Thanks that helps a lot.
Seems to me like you can win by default for people like me.

Just want to click a website and start playing music that's decent in one click, I can't be stuffed researching or downloading albums. In europe all the sites I liked in the USA have we are coming soon banners, aka massive opportunity to win by default at the moment in terms of traffic (although to be honest I have no idea how you would get me to buy something, guilt me into supporting artists by showing them pictures of their kids maybe).

Minus points:

Keeps playing the same songs, I don't really even notice because I am music retarded, but my gf will kill me if I put your website back up.

Tried to login with facebook to see if that would play me some different ones, says it wants permission to post to my wall. No way in hell am I giving you that.
Doesn't that break using variables owned by the constructor?
That is something which looks pretty doable. It would be worth taking a crack at it.
Water-Scraper: Underwater Architecture
Objects on Rails: How to Apply Classic OO Ideas to Rails Apps
Yes indeed. There are several limiting factors, but we're always looking to un/de limit them.
So the plan is to force the UI-team to work in javascript and that way automatically get rid of the kernel-guys?

No, but seriously, who does that today? (aside from one-man operations) And how is this going to help?

As to a third party GUI, I'm fond of the idea in for instance the android world. Instead of manufacturer-specific user interfaces, why not a third party interface developed by an independent company that doesn't produce phones. As it is now manufacturers care more about being unique than good and google doesn't put enough effort in it because everyone will change it eiterway.

But there are serious obstacles to succeeding with that and I don't see why that has anything to do with the development-side of it.
It was broadband (well, high speed LAN) on college campuses.
As some who co-founded quantum mechanics, Einstein would never have said such a stupid thing. You expect to get different results from doing the same measurement in the same quantum mechanical system, that's the basis of it.
IT Consumerization, the Cloud and the Alleged Death of the CIO
How to Save and Delete Twitter Searches?
This definitely blurs the line between calling an app native or web based, at least from a business-marketing standpoint. However, far more interesting is to see the waves of innovation that APIs have created. APIs are becoming the personality of computer systems in the sense that they allow interaction and shielding from the outside world. As long as developers know how to interact with a system's personality they can now build just about anything. Furthermore, experience is becoming the new IP so I believe that such technologies will bring more and more experience innovation by providing easier and faster paths for high-level programmers to contribute to the ecosystem.
A media API is being developed (in co-operation with the W3C) to allow exactly that.

Further, apps will be able to request "trusted app" status to run with less cross domain restrictions.
@apgwoz: Thanks for sharing. Going to take a crack at it, and also try to make a VirtualBox OpenGenera appliance. No eta though, but the aspiration exists.
Are you in the US? Mixes are US only at this time. Non-US users can still use the personal music streaming service though. You install a tiny piece of software on your home machine and then can access all your music everywhere for free.
What would happen to the price of paper if suddenly demand is decimated like that? If the price of light paper goods increases dramatically, I predict that consumers will increasingly adopt new note-taking/scribbling solutions (like and iPad app). After one new generation of people grows up accustomed to accomplishing all of their formerly paper-based tasks digitally (even simple tasks like doodling), I believe that paper will truly be a fixture of the past.
No, the just posted libraries that WebOS uses. Much in the same way that Apple posts libraries that OSX uses.

http://www.apple.com/opensource/
I think your horizon is a little short here.

I'm ok with talking about things where we all agree, in that it can still deepen understanding and spur people to action. For example, most people here agree about the idiocy of TSA's security theater. But when I took a flight this week, I opted out of what I could partly because I know that some of my fellow nerds are doing the same.

I'm also ok with talking about things that don't seem to get resolved right away. A lot of major issues take decades to get sorted out. But I don't think they get resolved by ignoring them. Well, they often do, but I don't expect they'll get resolved in favor of my position that way.